Take Me Back
Bono Interviews Dylan & Van (1984)
From Hot Press:
Conducted at the Slane Castle, Dublin, Ireland prior to Dylan's show (JULY 8, 1984). Both Bono and Van Morrison were later guests at the show, Van Morrison doing his usual It's All Over Now, Baby Blue and Bono joining Dylan on Blowin' In The Wind.
Bono: Van, what do you think of electronic music?
Morrison: I like the music Brian Eno plays.
Bono: He speaks very highly of you. He's producing our record right now.
Morrison: Say hello.
Bono: When you're working with a producer, do you give him the lee-way to challenge you?
Dylan: Yeah, if he feels like it. But usually we just go into the studio and sing a song, and play the music, and have, you know ...
Bono: Have you had somebody in the last five years who said "That's crap, Bob"?
Dylan: Oh, they say that all the time!
Bono: Mark Knopfler, did he say that?
Dylan: I don't know, they spend time getting their various songs right, but with me, I just take a song into the studio and try to rehearse it, and then record it, and then do it. It's a little harder now though to make a good record - even if you've got a good song and a good band. Even if you go in and record it live, it's not gonna sound like it used to sound, because the studios now are so modern, and overly developed, that you can take anything good and you can press it and squeeze it and squash it, and constipate it and suffocate it. You do a great performance in the studio and you listen back to it because the speakers are all so good, but, ah, no!
Bono: All technology does is - you go into a dead room with dead instruments and you use technology to give it life that it doesn't have, and then it comes out of the speakers and you believe it. What I've been trying to do is find a room that has life in itself.
Dylan: Yeah.
Bono: A 'living' room.
Dylan: The machines though, can even take the life out of that room, I've found. You can record in St Peter's Cathedral, you know, and they still make it sound like, eh, ...
Bono: Somebody's backyard.
Dylan: Yeah.
Dylan: That's a good idea. I'd love to record in a cathedral.
Dylan: You know the studios in the old days were all much better, and the equipment so much better, there's no question about it in my mind. You just walked into a studio, they were just big rooms, you just sang, you know, you just made records; and they sounded like the way they sounded there. That stopped happening in the late Sixties, for me anyway. I noticed the big change. You go into a studio now and they got rugs on the floor, settees and pinball machines and videos and sandwiches coming every ten minutes. It's a big expensive party and you're lucky if you come out with anything that sounds decent.
Bono: Yeah, records haven't got better, have they?
Dylan: No, you go in now, you got your producer, you got your engineer, you got your assistant engineer, usually your assistant producer, you got a guy carrying the tapes around. I mean, you know, there's a million people go into recording just an acoustic song on your guitar. The boys turn the machines on and it's a great undertaking.
Bono: There's a system called Effanel which Mick Fleetwood from Fleetwood Mac brought to Africa. It was built for him because he wanted to get some real African drummin', for "Tusk". We've used that system. It comes in a light suitcase, very small, no bullshit studio, and it just arrives, you can literally bring it to your living room.
Morrison: I think all the same they'll go back to 2-track eventually.
Bono: There's a guy called Conny Plank, who lives in Germany. He's a producer I think. He produced Makem and Clancy and some Irish traditional bands, also orchestral and funnily enough a lot of the new electronic groups, DAF, Ultravox, and so on. He used to record orchestras by just finding a position in the room where they were already balanced and he applies this in his thinking, in recording modern music: he finds a place in the room where it's already mixed.
Morrison: I don't know, when I started we didn't think about that! You didn't even think about recording ... (laughs)
Bono: You didn't even think!
Morrison: You didn't even know what was on the cards. One day you were in the room, they turned the tape on. After about eight hours or so, they'd say, 'OK, tea break, it's over'.
Dylan: Yeah, next song, next song!
Morrison: And that was that - it was an album.
Dylan: Yeah, you'd make an album on three days or four days and it was over - if that many! It's that long now ... it takes four days to get a drum sound.
Bono: Do you know the Monty Python team, they're comedians, British comedians, 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail'. They have a sketch that reminds me of you guys - sitting back talking of days gone by: "You tell that to the young people of today and they'd never believe you". But you can't go backwards, you must go forward. You try to bring the values that were back there, you know, the strength, and if you see something that was lost, you got to find a new way to capture that same strength. Have you any idea of how to do that? I think you've done it by the way ... I think 'Shot Of Love', that opening track has that.
Dylan: I think so too, You're one of the few people to say that to me about that record, to mention that record to me.
Bono: That has *that* feeling.
Dylan: It's a great record, it suits just about everybody.
Bono: The sound from that record makes me feel like I'm in the same room as the other musicians. I don't feel like they're over *there*. Some of our records, I feel like they're over there because we got into this cinema type sound, not bland like FM sound, but we got into this very broad sound. Now we're trying to focus more of a punch, and that's what we are after, this intimacy .... I've never interviewed anybody before, by the way. I hate being interviewed myself.
Morrison: You're doing a good job!
Bono: Is this OK?. Good! What records do you listen to?
Dylan: What records do I listen to? New records? I don't know, just the old records really. Robert Johnson. I still listen to those records that I listened to when I was growing up - they really changed my life. They still change my life. They still hold up, you know. The Louvain Brothers, Hank Williams, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Charlie Patton, I always liked to listen to him.
Bono: I just bought Woody Guthrie's 'Bound For Glory'. I'm just a beginner when it comes to America. I mean, it's changed me. When you go the US, coming from this country, it's more than a different continent ....
Morrison: It's shell shock.
Bono: Yeah, coming from troubled Ireland, it's the real shell shock! I'm just getting acquainted with American music and literature. Do you still see Allen Ginsberg?
Dylan: I run across Allen from time to time, yeah, Gregory Corsos's back now, he's doing some readings, I think he's just published a new book.
Bono: I've just been reading this book 'Howl'.
Dylan: Oh, that's very powerful. That's another book that changed me. 'Howl', 'On the Road', 'Dharma Bums'.
Morrison: (to Bono) Have you read 'On the Road'?
Bono: Yes I have, I'm just starting that. You have a reference in one of your songs to John Donne, 'Rave On John Donne'. Have you read his poetry?
Morrison: I was reading it at the time.
Dylan: (to Bono) You heard the songs - Brendan Behan's songs?
Bono: Yeah.
Dylan: 'Royal Canal', you know the 'Royal Canal'?
Morrison: His brother wrote it. His name is Dominic.
Dylan: Oh, Dominic wrote 'Royal Canal'?
Bono: You know Brendan's son hang out around here in Dublin. He's a good guy, I believe.
Dylan: I know the solo lyrics to the 'Royal Canal'. I used to sing it all the time.
Bono: How does it go?
Dylan: (sings) 'The hungry feeling came over me stealing, as the mice were squalling in my prison cell'.
Bono: That's right, yeah!
Dylan: (continues) 'That old triangle went jingle jangle, all along the banks of the Royal Canal'.
Bono: That's right, when did you read that?
Dylan: (there's no way stopping him now) 'In the female prison there's seventy women. It's all over there that I want to dwell. And that old triangle goes jingle jangle, all along the banks of the Royal Canal'.
Bono: Have you been to the Royal Canal?
Dylan: No I used to sing that song though. Every night.
Bono: Our music - as I was saying earlier - it doesn't have those roots.
Morrison: Yeah, there was a break in the lineage. I sussed that out when I went to see Thin Lizzy years ago, the first night in L.A. and I was watching at the back of the stage and I realized that the music was a complete cut in the connection between the end of the Sixties and the middle of the Seventies - a severing of the traditional lineage of groups.
Bono: I like to know more about roots music. I'm hungry for a past.
Morrison: You know you should listen to some of that stuff.
Bono: I will. I've been listening to some gospel music, you know, like the Swan Silvertones, and stuff like that.
Dylan: That's US stuff though.
Morrison: US stuff, but the British stuff you should listen to, you know, like some of the old stuff, like the Yardbirds.
Bono: Yeah, I've got some of their tapes recently, some real good tapes.
Dylan: You can still hear the McPeakes. The next generation may not be able to though. Who knows? I would hate to think that. Listen we're gonna have to get ready to play. Are you gonna stay for the show?
Bono: Certainly, that's what I'm here for actually.
Dylan: To record it, HA!
Guardian More than any other writer, Van Morrison seems blessed with a transformational power to bring a beautiful vision to even the most humdrum objects and events
From Hot Press:
Bono: There's a system called Effanel which Mick Fleetwood from Fleetwood Mac brought to Africa. It was built for him because he wanted to get some real African drummin', for "Tusk". We've used that system. It comes in a light suitcase, very small, no bullshit studio, and it just arrives, you can literally bring it to your living room.
Morrison: You didn't even know what was on the cards. One day you were in the room, they turned the tape on. After about eight hours or so, they'd say, 'OK, tea break, it's over'.
Morrison: You're doing a good job!
Morrison: (to Bono) Have you read 'On the Road'?
Morrison: Yeah, there was a break in the lineage. I sussed that out when I went to see Thin Lizzy years ago, the first night in L.A. and I was watching at the back of the stage and I realized that the music was a complete cut in the connection between the end of the Sixties and the middle of the Seventies - a severing of the traditional lineage of groups.
A special programme, Listening To Van Morrison, with Greil Marcus, American music and cultural critic, author of Listening to Van Morrison (Faber), as he explains what he has come to understand about Morrison's music from paying it deep attention, with special emphasis on the achievement and enduring appeal of Astral Weeks (1968).
The first hour, after the now traditional throat warmers (Baby Please Don't Go>Here Comes The Night>BEG) was stunning - it summed up the reason why we all do this. All In The Game, In The Garden, a great Celtic Excavation>Into The Mystic and the rendition of Ballerina was the best I've heard - a completely different song - but then..............
